How Americans Can Help World Peace (Press TV)

A first step for world peace is for the American people to rein in their reckless government from the international stage and to stop it making misery for so many.

Americans need democratic government like the rest of the world needs rid of Washington's thuggish global policeman.

This may come as a shock to many ordinary Americans who tend to think that their country is already the beacon of democratic light unto the world, bestowing all sorts of benevolence to others. Such delusional "American exceptionalism" has to stop. America is only special in a very negative meaning. It plays a central part in fomenting conflict in almost every scenario we care to look at.

We see this nefarious US role in the never-ending Israeli-Palestinian travesty known as a "peace process". In reality, this process is but a continual green light for the Israeli regime to commit massive violation of international laws against the long-suffering Palestinian people.

US Secretary of State John Kerry this week rushed off to the Israeli regime allegedly to urge its Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to engage with Palestinians. To many ordinary Americans, as told by their news media, Washington is acting as a hapless peace broker between two implacable opponents. Wrong.

The US is indulging, as it always has, a systematically criminal Israeli regime, which continues to build illegal settlements in contravention of Geneva and Nuremberg principles, and which is reneging on past commitments to unconditionally release thousands of Palestinian prisoners as part of the Oslo Accord signed more than 20 years ago.

Washington does nothing, nothing, to stop this Israeli affront to humanity. In fact, the US is fully complicit with these crimes against humanity by bankrolling the Israeli regime to the tune of $3 billion every year.

This fawning by Washington is underscored also this week by US army chief Martin Dempsey who was visiting his Israeli counterpart Benny Gantz. Photographs of the smiling military bosses, days after Israel killed civilians in air strikes on Gaza, speaks of the real relationship, and it shows unequivocally which side Washington is on with regard to this decades-old mass suffering. There will never be peace in Palestine - because of Washington.

Meanwhile, we also see the inimical role of the US in a new flare up of conflict between North and South Korea. The two countries have this week exchanged live fire across their maritime border, accompanied by warnings of an all-out war. Again, the US poses here as some kind of "honest broker" of peace between two belligerent parties.

However, only a few weeks ago, the North and South had come up with a groundbreaking mutual deal to allow family visits between the two estranged halves of the Korean Peninsula, which has been partitioned since the end of the civil war in 1953.

That small, but significant, peace initiative was predictably scuttled because of the war games that the US and its South Korean ally embark on every year. Those military exercises involve provocative rehearsals for the US-led invasion of North Korea. Last year, the exercises entailed the US flying nuclear-weapon bombers over North Korean territory.

During the Korean War of 1950-53, the northern part of the Peninsula was bombed mercilessly by US warplanes, to the point where the people were forced to live in deep mountain caves in order to survive the onslaught. Today, American so-called war games are no trifling matter for North Koreans who lost millions of their people from past American incineration.

Six decades on, the US arrogates the right to impose its military power over Korea under the guise of being a "peace broker" and "protector". The fact is that the two Koreas would probably revert to the natural justice of a unified country if Washington were to pack up its giant military spectre and go home.

Of course, the US is not going to do that because the real reason for its presence in Korea is to project its military power over the Asia-Pacific and in particular over China. This pernicious, unreasonable presence of American military in that region also leads to recurring tensions between China and its neighbours, including Japan, the Philippines and Vietnam.

Back to the Middle East, the humanitarian catastrophe of Syria is the result of US-led regime change in that country. As the top NATO member and main military sponsor of Saudi Arabia and the other Persian Gulf monarchical dictatorships, which are arming the foreign mercenaries ransacking that country, Washington is the primary player in prolonging the conflict in Syria. This bloodshed is in its fourth year and has claimed over 130,000 lives. Proportionate to population, that death toll would be equivalent to over 1.7 million American citizens, if Syria were to somehow sponsor a covert terror war inside the US.

The American indulgence of the Persian Gulf Arab despots is also why the people of Bahrain continue to have their democratic rights crushed, and why thousands of its tiny population languish in torture dungeons.

Plans by the US, as revealed by General Martin Dempsey this week, to bring the Arab despots into a closer military alliance with Israel will inevitably lead to more tensions and conflict in the region towards Iran. This will predictably lead to more spurious allegations about Iranian nuclear ambitions, which will in turn lead to continuing offensive sanctions against Iran. In short, this is a formula for perpetual conflict in the Persian Gulf as sponsored by Washington. And, of course, perpetual American weapons sales.

Finally, we may note the dominant, negative role played by the US in stoking tensions between Europe and Russia over Ukraine. As revealed in a previous column, the strategic rationale for Washington since the end of Second World War has been to ensure division between Moscow and other European states. This relates to implicit American concerns over fuel energy trade, military and political influence, and the survival of the bankrupt US dollar as global reserve currency.

Washington's instigated regime-change operation in Ukraine at the end of February, which resulted in an unelected fascist junta coming to power in Kiev, has created the worse diplomatic crisis between Europe and Russia for decades. The US seems hell-bent on escalating tensions with its strident call for economic sanctions against President Putin's government and its build up of NATO military forces encircling Russia.

We could add more evidential cases, such as the current US incitement of violence in Venezuela; and its ongoing, crucial support for the military junta in Egypt, which overthrew democracy last year when it deposed the elected president, Mohamed Morsi, and which has since caused thousands of fatalities over the past nine months, including hundreds of Muslim Brotherhood supporters being sentenced to death in outrageous show trials.

The sobering fact for many Americans is that the world would be a better, far more peaceful place if only their government spent more time and resources tending to their own country's onerous social needs. Needless to say, America would be a far better place too for its citizens.

But this eminently reasonable outcome won't happen under present circumstances because US governance relies on imperialist conflict-making abroad.

That simple, despicable fact about the true nature of US government won't change until the American people radically change the fundamental nature of their country's politics and economics, beginning with kicking out the two-party plutocrats of big business.

Americans need to discover real democracy, not the Mickey Mouse version they have been brainwashed with. Then the world might start to know peace.

Finian Cunningham (born 1963) has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published in several languages. He is a Master’s graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a scientific editor for the Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a career in journalism. He is also a musician and songwriter. For nearly 20 years, he worked as an editor and writer in major news media organisations, including The Mirror, Irish Times and Independent.